On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted unanimously that Celestine Jeffreys, the former city clerk of Green Bay, violated state law by sending duplicate absentee ballots in two consecutive 2026 elections and misused her discretion in managing the office.
The result concludes the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s complaint following the April spring election, when Jeffreys’ office sent two different absentee ballots to 152 voters. It also includes the June reprint, which sent a second ballot to an estimated 244 voters before the August 11 primary and, as the city admitted in its own filings, possibly as many as 390 voters. A summary of the issues in the staff materials for Wednesday’s meeting stated that “when a clerk maintains records of her actions and procedures that are so poor that she is unable to tell afterward whether she had sent out 240 duplicate absentee ballots or 390 of them, she has misused her discretion.”
For each race, the city said it recorded only one ballot per voter, but that was not the standard the commission applied. Wisconsin law allows an elector to receive one absentee ballot for each request. It should never happen that the same elector receives two identical ‘live’ ballots,” commission staff stated in July when they first had reason to believe that Green Bay had broken Wis. Stat. §§ 6.86(1)(ar) and 7.15. The vote on Wednesday confirmed that finding. The commission took no further action against Jeffreys; she resigned on August 7.
Republicans said in May that this would happen. After the April duplicates, Green Bay’s lawyers told the commission that the statute “does not impose liability for inadvertent duplication” and that since no second ballot had been counted, “no violation of Wisconsin election laws had taken place”. The Republicans responded sharply by saying, “A clerk who does not believe the law prohibits the issuance of duplicate ballots cannot be trusted to prevent it from happening again.” Less than three months later, it happened again.
City Attorney Lacey Cochart later told the commission that Jeffreys printed both the original labels and the additional ones. In March, she processed a batch of 152 requests through WisVote, made photocopies of the labels, and either didn’t attach the original ones to the sheets or reprinted the entire batch without consulting staff. In June, she reviewed labels from a print shop for the August primary, concluded that some pages were missing, and printed the relevant pages from the PDF, but the city still has not confirmed whether any were missing. A voter texted her on June 27 to say two ballots had arrived. Only then did the office inform the mayor, Eric Genrich, and the commission. The wards affected were 11a, 12a, 37a, 44, 45, 46, 47, and part of 43. Jeffreys referred to it as a “printing error” and stated that voters had a right to “clear, accurate and reliable election administration.”
That was not her first trip to the commission. Jeffreys, appointed in 2021 to run elections in Wisconsin’s third-largest city, was found in December 2023 to have likely violated state law by accepting absentee ballots returned by a third party for a voter who was merely described as “sick,” not disabled. In 2024, she acknowledged that for several elections she had not deactivated Election Day registrants after confirmation postcards came back undeliverable, a step state law requires. The 2026 duplicates were the ones that ended the job. On July 9, the commission voted unanimously to investigate both mailings. That afternoon, Genrich placed her on leave. Deputy Clerk Stacy Menke is serving as interim clerk.
Democrat commissioner Ann Jacobs called two rounds of duplicates in one year “unconscionable.” GOP commissioners and WisGOP Chair Brian Schimming said the commission had to hold Jeffreys accountable so it would not happen a third time. The city has now imposed a multi-step reprint rule: no one person, including the clerk, can reprint even one absentee label alone. Absentee ballots for the November 3 general election are scheduled to start going out September 17.
The commission’s Wednesday order is a legal conclusion, not a criminal charge; it is also a record. A clerk in a city with a population of 100,000 sent out hundreds of extra live ballots, twice; told the state the law did not prohibit it; was unable to count the extra ballots herself; and left office before the November statewide election. The statute states that one voter should have one ballot; Green Bay was therefore told on two separate occasions, and only after the commission had unanimously decided it, that this too is the law.
